First Sight: The Rune Sight Chronicles Read online

  “Mr. Wright,” she said turning back to the camera, her face ashen, “This is an extreme response to what I am asking of you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I’ve been avoiding you and your kind for almost eighty years. The only way you’re going to get to me, is after you kill me, and if you think the trap you’re in now is impressive, try driving out of here with me unwillingly in tow. I’ll drop half the mountain on your heads.”

  I heard a low whistle behind me and turned to see JJ, grinning ear to ear.

  “I don’t know what you think my intentions really are, but I assure you, I mean you no harm—”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” I replied sourly, my anxiety ratcheting up so high I was worried my heart was going to fail. “I’ve seen what you bastards do to people who don’t come quietly. That’s why I am going to give you guys sixty seconds before I first set off the claymores and then hit the button to the bigger fireworks.”

  “I’m leaving my card for you, on the mat. When you’re not feeling so paranoid, call me.”

  I watched her turn to leave and then triggered a camera I had placed up high, at the outer range of my equipment. I kept panning it and zooming until I was sure they were gone.

  “Rose, is there any way you can make sure they are gone?” I asked.

  She grinned and flew closer to me. “This is going to be fun, boss.”

  She kissed me on the nose and then glided backwards and snapped her fingers. She was gone in a poof of purple smoke.

  “That’s a badass trick. Do you really have this joint rigged to blow?” JJ asked.

  “Yes,” I told him, “and a failsafe that’ll take out the bunker here.”

  “Dude, I never would have guessed this was here; it’s dug right into the mountain, isn’t it?” JJ asked.

  “Yes…” a puff of purple smoke and Rose was back in front of me.

  “As far as I can tell, they are fleeing as fast as they can. The one who is talking to the mage you call Vivian smells like he may have lost control of his bowels. They seemed shocked at your preparations, and they are even more shocked at your age. I don’t think they were expecting the response you gave them. One of them was whining that she had shit for intel on you.”

  I grinned silently.

  “So, our Alpha is a badass?” JJ asked Rose.

  She spun in the air, looking him over. “I wasn’t impressed much beyond his hand to hand skills until now. But he’s nuttier than squirrel shit and twice as zany. I think we chose a good guy to chill with.”

  “Nuttier than squirrel shit?” I asked as they both cackled. “Really? Not, supremely prepared? Just a paranoid tinfoil hatter who’s a lunatic?”

  “Squirrel shit,” JJ snickered, and the both of them started laughing again.

  “I’m not putting up with this,” I said, pushing my chair back after putting most of the monitors back to sleep.

  “Where are you going?” JJ asked.

  “To get her card,” I told him.

  Now that they were gone, the mages that was, I was suddenly hit with the loss of adrenaline and I felt tired. My worst fears, my biggest worry. Not only had it manifested right here at my front door, I’d stared it down, from behind the monitors… and had found my preparations more than a match for them. It didn’t matter the amount of magic somebody has, a well-placed bullet or bomb will take out even the most powerful magic users and supernaturals. Maybe, since she’d left, she really hadn’t been here to kill me. But only time would tell.

  All mages seem to have a magical battery within their body. I was no different, but my sight didn’t use very much. I always walked around with a full tank, though there were some days I’d have gladly traded my sight for something useful like fire or ice magic. Or something like healing life magic. Instead, I had a type that seemed to make me paranoid and slowly drive me mad. Then again, that could have been the werewolf and fairy locked in the bunker with me. What I could do, though, was use my well of magic and make magical items and store a charge of my will inside of them, with the runes I’d learned over the years.

  I had an entire bookshelf dedicated to runes and the creation of magical artifices. After five decades of practice, I was pretty good and I’d made many of the weapons that now adorned the back walls of the bunker. JJ of course loved them and wanted to play with everything. That didn’t bug me as he didn’t load any of the guns, but Rose cared not one bit for weapons. She was sulking due to the lack of sunlight. I gave her a thimbleful of honey when she got especially touchy. But it was like giving a woman shots of tequila then refusing to dance with her.

  Anyway, I continued to use the well of magic within me to imbue objects. My gate to the bunker had used a ton of magic, but with three days’ worth of storage, not only did I have that charm recharged, I had a couple of backups for other places recharged as well. I’d given everyone a primer on what I wanted to do, but that was it. JJ had been coming and going from the bunker in the meantime, and had directed the Home Depot delivery up the hill as far as they could drag the materials. He wasn’t going to come with me, and he knew he was about to be locked out of my redoubt. He didn’t care; he and Rose spent long afternoons whispering and planning.

  “Rose,” I said, getting up and heading towards the vault door.

  “Is it time, Tom?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You ready to go on a trip?”

  “Yes boss,” she said in a small voice.

  “You sure you don’t want your freedom, get away from this crazy train I call my life?”

  “I still don’t know what kind of man you really are, but you sent six Council mages scurrying off your mountain with little more than planning and balls the size of walnuts.”

  “Uh… thanks?”

  “No, I mean, walnuts are HUGE.”

  “You’re not making this any better,” I told her and pulled the charm necklace out from under my shirt.

  I felt her land on my shoulder but didn’t turn to look. It was weird; I’d spent most of my life alone but suddenly I had a small pack in my life, I was now friend to a local pack… oh, and I had a fairy riding shotgun as I was about to gate.

  “Are you sure this is going to be safe for you?” I asked Rose.

  “Are you sure you’re really a mage? I haven’t seen any magical stuff.”

  First, she talks about my balls, now she’s going after my Mojo? I needed to find a flower patch and dump this two bit, short little pain in my—

  “Oh, there we go,” Rose said, as I pushed my will into the charm, activating the gate.

  The portal shimmered and, before I could lose it, I stepped through, letting it close behind me. I looked around and saw a few joggers running down paved bike trails. Mature maple trees blocked the sunlight and the sounds of traffic were everywhere.

  “Central Park smells,” Rose complained.

  “We won’t be in New York City long,” I told her. “I just have to make a phone call.”

  I pulled my phone and Vivian’s card out of my pocket and walked towards a bench. I didn’t have to worry about Rose being seen. She instinctively knew and could turn herself invisible to anybody she didn’t want to see her.

  See, unlike me, fairies didn’t have to use magic, they were magic. They were the little folk from the Fae realm, something I had a rudimentary working knowledge of, but had never really had any experience with, until I’d decided to go ten bouts with JJ. I still bore the bruises of that fight. Why the little lady wanted to stick by me was anybody’s guess, especially when given her choice of being free… instead, she chose to stay. That was something I did not understand at all.

  I mean, I got it that JJ wanted to stay. He’d spent a good chunk of his adulthood running from one pack or another, just because he was an Alpha without accorded territory. Now he sort of had a place to call his own, to hunt and live without fear; that had to help. A hundred acres might sound like a lot, but it really wasn’t, and I fully expected to ask permission from a new Alph
a to allow JJ passage through, once I’d gated him to somewhere else so I wouldn’t have to risk angering the local packs. He would eventually want his own territory, unless he’d given that up to me in the challenge? I’d have to do more research, because I honestly didn’t know.

  “Can I watch you use the phone? I like the colors,” Rose said from behind me.

  I didn’t answer her, but smiled. I turned on the phone and waited for it to boot up and looked at the business card that had been dropped.

  Vivian Sparks – Department of Investigations, New York City. It listed a phone number. Department of Investigations? Was that a division of the local police, the FBI? Some alphabet soup from the government? I didn’t know and I honestly didn’t care much. All I knew was I had enough energy stored in my necklace now to make three separate jumps before I had to either hide or go back to my bunker redoubt in Utah. I listened to Rose ‘Oooh’ and ‘Ahhh’ as I pressed the buttons on the phone and hit send.

  I was still handling the card when I heard half a ring tone and then a voice was answering.

  “Department of Investigations, this is Lucinda, how may I direct your call?”

  “Lucinda, I’m calling to speak to Miss Vivian Sparks,” I said, and started looking around.

  “Please hold while I connect you.”

  Elevator music started and I turned my head slightly, “You’re on, short stuff.”

  “I ought to dust you for that,” Rose said and I saw a translucent version of her lift off my shoulder and zip away, fading into invisibility.

  It was hard not to make short jokes to a woman with wings who stood barely five inches tall. If it really bugged her, she’d have to let me know, because her language wavered between that of a drunken sailor and a proper English lady with a hint of an Irish accent.

  “This is Vivian,” her voice said in the earpiece.

  I stood and started looking, making sure nobody was here. Technically they’d had enough time already to have triangulated me, but probably knew if they gated to me immediately, I’d have measures in place. I did, sort of, but nothing like they were expecting after seeing what it’d do to them when they came at me from my stronghold.

  “This is Wright,” I told her. “I decided to give you a ring and see what it is you really want, and to caution you not to come to me without warning.”

  Vivian let out an audible breath and for a moment I saw a small shimmer of green in the air about ten feet up. A fairy signal that things were still safe to proceed.

  “I told it to you straight, Wright,” she said, a note of tension in her voice. “We found an imbued item and we needed expert level help to see how it works.”

  “If I believed that, then how about you tell me what kind of item it is?” I asked her, expecting her to give me some double speak, or tell me I had to come to her to see it or—

  “It’s an enchanted knife; it was used to kill a council mage who was in the running to become The Librarian.”

  I swallowed. The Librarian was the mages’ gatekeeper of knowledge. It wasn’t the most important position in the world of magic, but it was almost right there at the top. It was a political position as much as it was a functional position.

  “What makes you think you need my help?” I asked, and saw another green flash from Rose.

  “You’ve been on our radar since the late seventies. You took out the Warlock who was working on necromancy in Ghana.”

  “Damn, I thought I got out of there clean.”

  “We were the ones paying the bill,” she said softly. “You’ve done lots of jobs for us over the years, till about fifteen years ago when you disappeared. Your handler said you’d retired. It took a while, but I found you in Vegas. Everybody loves Vegas.”

  This whole time I had been running from them, and I had thought it had been about whatever it was they had chased and killed my mother for. Now my fear and anger turned to curiosity. I’d done jobs for them? As in, more than one? I’d never been a hitman or assassin, but I had killed the odd person now and then, but only when I’d had no other choice. The case Vivian was talking about had been a suspected zombie outbreak in a remote village.

  I’d always assumed the money came from a government entity, but I’d never realized it was the American government. Still, this was all assuming I believed them.

  “Yes, it’s what I do for fun now,” I told her.

  “And it’s quite lucrative from what I hear, though you never stay long. You make a small tidy sum and then disappear for a while.”

  “Yeah, the money is nice, but when you live this long… investments and compounding interest really start to add up.”

  “Is it true, you’re in your eighties?” she asked, her voice changing ever so slightly.

  “I really don’t feel comfortable giving you people a lot of information. Now, why is it you think I can help you with this item? This enchanted knife?”

  “Because your after-action report your handler turned in talked of you carving unbinding runes into the lead bullets you used to take out the re-animated. That takes a level of craft that not many have. Either you bought the items ahead of time or are a walking arsenal or…”

  “I made them custom for the job at hand,” I finished the thought and admitted to the last bit.

  “Precisely. This dagger has similar runes. I need help identifying them and then—”

  “What are you offering?” I asked her.

  “The Department of Investigations doesn’t—”

  “Oh, come now, you folks had no reason to hold back payment when I did work for you as a cutout contract hunter, now did you?”

  “Is it really money you want? I’m sure, given enough time I can arrange that, as long as it’s a reasonable amount.”

  “What if I want information?” I asked her.

  “What sort of information?” she asked coyly, thinking she had me.

  “I’ll tell you when I’m ready to cash that in. What do you say?”

  “What will you use the information for? I mean, I can’t just give you a blanket promise without at least knowing your intent.”

  “It’s about an old murder case. A really old one. I want to know who, what, when, where and why. I already know how, but I want the rest.”

  “And what will you do if you find out that information? I mean, who are we talking about here?”

  My Gods, she had no idea. Had I really been running scared almost my entire life to be a nothing, a nobody to them? Why had my mother died and why had the council been after her? From an early age I’d been taught that to be around the Council of Magic and Mages was dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. My mom had died running from them. Probably by one of their enforcers, though I had no direct evidence.

  “Depending on what I find out, I might go on another hunt,” I admitted.

  “You would be a vigilante?”

  “I’ve been a lot of things in my life. Hunter and mercenary are often interchangeable words to describe the same thing, don’t you think?”

  “But here on American soil you’d be hunted and prosecuted by either the mundane or mages. What you ask is… I will agree to it, but I reserve the right to leave out names if it looks like it would compromise the safety of the government.”

  “I want all the details, or we have no deal and I go back into hiding. Do you think I would really only have hideouts under this name?”

  “No,” she said with a sigh, “You seem far more resourceful and paranoid than any other tinkerer that we’ve come across.”

  “Tinkerer?” I asked, remembering that she’d used those words before.

  “You’re a technomage of some sort, maybe a little learned rune skills, yeah?”

  “Something like that,” I told her with a grin, delighted at her ignorance. “Grab the knife and meet me in Central Park in five minutes.”

  “Central Park? Are you kidding? That’s right across the street.”

  Gulp. I hadn’t known she was that close. Guess I should ha
ve figured out how to track her phone number and address down before I’d done this. Of all the planning I’d done in my lifetime, I’d screwed up one vital detail—

  “It’ll take me about ten minutes to get the knife out of storage. I’ll gate in over by the duck pond so you can see me coming. I assure you, I am coming alone and I won’t… There’ll be no need for any repeat performances like the last two times I tried to speak to you.”

  “Good, because we’ll be waiting. Goodbye Vivian.”

  “We?” she asked and I hit end on the call and pocketed the phone.

  “Did she take the bait?” Rose said, becoming visible to me and landing on my shoulder.

  “Yes, she did. You ready to get cold?”

  “No. But if I must… do you think you can start the pocket warmer now, before we uh…?”

  “Sure,” I said and reached into my pocket.

  I was wearing a suit, which in the heat of summer might have looked silly, but wasn’t all that horrible. In my pocket was a chemical heater. It worked by flexing a piece of metal that set off a reaction. I’d tested it once with Rose and she’d made me layer it in two wool socks so it wouldn’t burn her. It was a nice sized lump, but if the Fairy were to survive my next stop, she’d need the extra heat. She wasn’t a denizen of the Winter Court and was susceptible to the cold, at least the level of cold where we were going next.

  “Do you think the bracelet will work?” I asked Rose. “I never used one like it before.” I started walking towards the duck pond, only a short distance away.

  “Your runes looked sound. The design seemed to be an exact replica of the one in the book. You sure you need it to be that… as prepared as you are?”

  “Yes. It’ll give us a time to gate out of there. I didn’t tell her about this condition on purpose.”

  “I know, I know. Part of the plan. Now, my big chunk of man meat, mush, let’s go see the ducks!”

  She waved a fairy wand forward and I almost cracked up. Chunk of man meat? Mush? I thought I knew about fairies, but now I had to wonder. Maybe I could get Rose to settle down if I could find her a five-inch-tall hunk of her own man meat. Grinning, I found a bench about twenty yards from the pond and sat down and waited.